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Day #92: Evil Things (2009)

[From IMDB:] On January 9, 2009, five college students left New York City for a weekend in the country. 48 hours later, all five students have simply vanished without a trace. There were no leads and no evidence – until now.

My take:

Unfortunately, Evil Things (the correct one, this time) is one of those movies that starts off showing some promise, but which ends up disappointing. And it really is disappointing, because there’s the core elements of a good movie in here.

The acting in Evil Things is great for this kind of movie. The cast all come across as genuine people (as opposed to just characters), who have known each other for a while. That’s exactly what you need from these types of found footage movies. If the cast don’t work, then nothing else will.

Or, as is the case here: while the cast worked, nothing else did.

Well, okay, that’s not entirely fair. There were a couple of moments where I thought the movie was going to go in one direction, and follow one set of found footage movie tropes, only to have it change direction. This gave me the impression that the filmmaker was giving a nod to fans of the genre, even if it was done in a way that didn’t exactly make sense (like when they get lost in the woods). But these moments of interest are largely lost amongst all the usual tropes of the genre, and some seemingly random overreactions to events that didn’t really warrant it. It seemed that the filmmakers spent more time trying to make us think that something big had happened, than actually putting in the effort to make anything happen.

And that’s one of the biggest problems with Evil Things: nothing much happens. Even when shit’s going down, it happens off screen; so we don’t actually know what happens to anyone. And that’s kind of annoying, because it means a lot of time is spent leading up to…no pay off. Hmmph.

If this cast were brought together for another film, I’d be interested in seeing it – as long as it was a different writer/director involved.